All posts in category GPS

OK, so we went dark for a bit. Turns out that cross-country travel is harder than we thought, especially when you factor in Mother Nature. On the road right now, Santa Barbara or bust, however late we get to The Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference. We set out early Tuesday morning with what we thought was plenty of time to get to Santa Barbara. And then the snow struck. Interstate 80 across the Sierra was buried under a foot of snow. Great for skiing, it was’t so good for driving. I felt a bit of panic when CalTrans announced on its 1-800 line that chains were required across Donner Pass through Truckee. I just remember the Donner Pass in reference to the family that ate its own to survive. Great! We found a cottage industry of roadside entrepreneurs at “chain check” willing to install our chains for 30 bucks. The guy who installed ours had been doing so for 30 years. He said he “doesn’t know anything different.” We only managed to scrape together 26 bucks. It was enough for him. And well worth it for him. I should add that his installation came after a failed attempt on my part to install the damned chains, myself. Not something needed much in Georgia, or New York, for that matter. Truckee locals made fun of me. In any event, once the chains were installed, we managed to go the next four hours at about 30 miles per hour. Stangely, the average MPG on the Mariner still hovered at around 26. But I have to say, the Mariner did us proud, especially considering it is only front-wheel drive. About four hours behind, we managed to scale the Sierras, and on the other end, decided we’d take off the chains ourselves. Bad move. Sounds simple. It’s not. Nut of it: The chains ended up tangled up in our chassis somehow. If Ford is reading this, um…. no permanent damage. I ended up cold, sopping wet, and later desperately changing into dry clothes in a sketchy Subway in Colfax, California. Thank God for those ski-like road markers so I knew where the road was.

Anyway, I’m in another world now, looking out at the green of central California’s “salad bowl” just south of Salinas, wondering why the fertile landscape hasn’t translated into green collar jobs. I’m driving amid some of the highest unemployment rates in California.

The open sky in Wyoming is intoxicating. There’s so much of it. That’s one reason, I guess, there are so many windmills, at least from what I could see off I80, and also, at least one random industrial sight that looks like it might be capable of staging intergalactic warfare.

Maybe it’s my time in California, but I always seem to become more hopeful as I head west, living the “go west, young man” mantra. That, or driving into the sunset every night makes one a bit sanguine about the torrent of depressing financial news. In researching this trip, I ran across a number of wind entrepreneurs in Wyoming who are looking to build massive wind farms here, employing out-of-work miners. Unlike parts of Kansas, I actually saw windmills moving here.

For the record, I had planned to visit Greensburg, Kansas well before President Obama mentioned it in his speech to Congress on Feb. 23. A good thing he did, though, because it let me put his eye-catching name in the headline above. But, it’s not as if the town was some well-kept secret. Destroyed by a massive tornado two years ago, it is rebuilding green. It has already been in the news a lot, but many of the reports on it seemed somewhat breathless and left me with questions, like, why would a tiny, stagecoach burg in the middle of the country suddenly decide to spend a lot more money and develop an environmental consciousness after not really doing much in that direction since its founding in 1886? Maybe that sounds cynical, but if we’re really want to build in a greener and more-sustainable way, it’s important to understand what motivates Americans. What I found is in my video. Click away, but if you don’t like cliffhangers, the answer isn’t as simple as I had thought. Instead, like most of life, it’s a complex calculus of human nature, public relations, tax breaks and altruism.

Kansas is surreal for a Georgia boy like me. Miles and miles of flat terrain, amber waves of grain, silos and a few lonely oil drills. You kind of get the feeling renewable energy here means pulling up to the gas pump to fill ‘er up.

If the buzz that you get on the two coasts about the future of energy is here, I’m not hearing it on this very brief drive-by. In fact, from talking to people here, it’s clear to me that the oil sector, however out of favor it has fallen, remains important to Kansas because it’s still how a lot of people in the state make their livings.

I know this cross-country trip I’m making is being subtitled by many of you as “the search for economic stimulus” or “toward a greener America.” But it also could be subtitled “where’s my tempeh, dude?” I’m a longtime vegetarian, and it’s not that easy to find rich and varied green offerings (of the leafy variety) to sustain yourself as you pass through some of this country’s finest beef land and the clusters of greasy-spoon diners and restaurants lining our interstate highways. Unless you’re a cud-chewing cow, of course. More on my food preferences later, because I digress.

As it turns out (because I planned my itinerary this way), I’ve been driving through many places outside of Oklahoma where the wind blows free.

Happily, I can say this country’s wind potential is as abundant as my vegetarian options are sparse.

Energy has been getting a huge amount of play in President Obama’s stimulus package. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t look at another massive piece of the plan, namely, the modernization of the American healthcare system. It’s getting $189 billion of the total $787 billion. So, what does that mean, and where’s the money going to go?

One element of modernization is to turn paper records into ones and zeroes, with great cost savings expected in the future. It’s a costly proposition to implement, though, which is why many doctors have resisted the switch for years. We’re talking up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per doctor. Included in the stimulus package is some money to make the move less painful.

I shot a few minutes of Dr. Patrick Goggin treating a few patients in his Cambridge, Ohio practice so you can see how it works in situ with his electronic tablet.

We all saw the environment play out on a national scale in the 2008 election campaign season. It’s now also getting planks in local campaign platforms across the midsection of America, with some interesting characters spouting some pretty dense green concepts to the electorate. In my prep work for this trip, I ran across a guy running for mayor in the small midwestern river town of Moline, Ill. Ahead of elections in April, Lewis Demetri is pushing a “Moline on the Mississippi” project to reshape his town using green values.

You can take the boy out of his gas-guzzler, but not the gas-guzzler out of the boy. Now that we’re safely out of state, the truth can be told! Turns out, end-of-the-month in Pennsylvania means quota time for the state trooper. And I have the speeding ticket to show for it. Yep, 82 in a 65-mph zone. Our travel companion, Jerome the Gnome, was laughing in my general direction with the trooper’s cruiser in front of us, as you can see.

Two Pennsylvania towns are handling the future quite differently. In Braddock, the mayor and other town officials are looking to snag some stimulus money to clean up the old, decaying Carrie Furnace steel plant site into a green community with homes and nearby commercial space. Meanwhile, in the borough of Homestead, the only green the mayor is interested in is money. Her town has built a suburban mall, hoping to inject life into the faded, local economy.

OK, this American Journey is supposed to be about cleaner and greener energy. But perhaps you’ve noticed there are no windmill farms in your neighborhood, that you can’t yet buy a plug’n-drive electric car and can’t take yourself fully off the grid with your own bank of solar panels. With mass-market alternative energy not quite ready for primetime, some companies are still plugging away at “old” economy energy, with an eye towards reducing reliance on foreign oil. One is NXT Energy, based in Calgary, with half of the company’s investors based in America. The company has developed a technology to pinpoint oil and gas hotspots from the air, using GPS to target untapped oil on and offshore.